Mixed Race Studies

The Coiled Serpent: An Interview with the Poetry Anthology’s Creators

La Bloga
Monday, 2016-03-28

Daniel A. Olivas

As already discussed here on La Bloga in a lovely review by Olga García Echeverría, Tía Chucha Press will publish this week a landmark poetry anthology, The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles. I am blessed to be one of the editors of this new book along with the very talented Neelanjana Banerjee and Ruben J. Rodriguez. The Coiled Serpent includes a powerful, eloquent introduction by the press’s founder, Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez. Of course, without the vision and poetic reach of Luis, this anthology would not have been born.

Of this anthology, Ohio State Professor Frederick Luis Aldama observes: “The dexterous hands of this high-octane trio of editors pull together in one exquisite volume LA’s finest of polymorphous polyglot poetic voices. The 150-plus poets disparately drop us into the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touch of our planet’s capital: the megalopolis of LA with its hybrid, polylingual, and interstitial peoples. As we brush up with and enter into the lives of the young and old, workers and artists, border crossers and code-shifters…. Persians, Asians, Latinos, African Americans, and all sorts in between, great seismic quakes of creativity invite us to feel life at its most sand-dirt blasting harshness as well as its most soothing and sweet. With The Coiled Serpent we feel the cyclonic force of poetic talent at the epicenter of change in the making of tomorrow’s planetary republic of letters.”

The Coiled Serpent will have its formal release event on March 30 at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles the week of AWP’s annual conference (more on the conference below).

In honor of The Coiled Serpent’s release, I posed two questions to Neelanjana Banerjee, Ruben J. Rodriguez and Luis J. Rodriguez. Here are their responses:

Which poems particularly touched you and why?

Read the entire interview here.

Pao: A Novel

Bloomsbury Publishing
2011-07-12
288 pages
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″
Paperback ISBN: 9781608195077
EPUB eBook ISBN: 9781608196845

Kerry Young

As a young boy, Pao comes to Jamaica in the wake of the Chinese civil war and rises to become the Godfather of Kingston’s bustling Chinatown. Pao needs to take care of some dirty business, but he is no Don Corleone. The rackets he runs are small time and the protection he provides necessary, given the minority status of the Chinese in Jamaica. Pao, in fact, is a sensitive guy in a wise guy role that doesn’t quite fit. Often mystified by all that he must take care of, Pao invariably turns to Sun Tsu’s Art of War. The juxtaposition of the weighty, aphoristic words of the ancient Chinese sage, and the tricky criminal and romantic predicaments Pao must negotiate goes far toward explaining the novel’s great charm.

A tale of post-colonial Jamaica from a unique and politically potent perspective, Pao moves from the last days of British rule through periods of unrest at social and economic inequality, though tides of change that will bring Rastafarianism and the Back to Africa Movement. Jamaica is transforming: And what is the place of a Chinese man in this new order? Pao is an utterly beguiling, unforgettable novel of race, class and creed, love and ambition, and a country in the throes of tumultuous change.

Voices of Diversity Presents “One Drop of Love” at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center

Jeanné Wagner Theatre
Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center
138 West 300 South
Salt Lake City, Utah 84101
Tuesday, 2016-03-29, 18:00-20:00 MDT (Local Time)

10th Anniversary of the Social Justice Lecture Series: Allies for Equity
Presented by Voices of Diversity of The University of Utah/College of Social Work
2015-2016

One Drop of Love is a multimedia solo performance by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. This extraordinary one-woman show incorporates filmed images, photographs, and animation to tell the story of how the notion of “race” came to be in the United States and how it affects our most intimate relationships. A moving memoir, One Drop of Love takes audiences from the 1700s to the present, to cities all over the U.S., and to West and East Africa, where Fanshen and her father spent time in search of their “racial” roots. The show encourages everyone to discuss “race” and racism openly and critically.

The performance will be immediately followed by a 30-minute Q&A with the artist. All are invited to stay after the show for a reception celebrating 10 years of the Social Justice Lecture Series: Allies for Equity!

• All events in this series are free and open to the public
• 2 NASW-endorsed CEUs will be available for $10 per event
• For more information, please call (801) 581-8455.

Understanding and Hearing the Afro-Asian Atlantic

Princeton University African American Studies
2016-03-21

Presenters: Tao Leigh Goffe, Kerry Young, Hannah Lowe, Randy Chin, and John Kuo Wei Tchen

A panel exploring the intersections of literature, reggae, and the relationships between the minority Chinese community in the Caribbean and the majority Afro-Caribbean community

This panel will be moderated by Tao Leigh Goffe (Princeton University) and John Kuo Wei Tchen (NYU)

In this dialogue, panelists Randy Chin, Kerry Young, and Hannah Lowe will discuss the African and Asian cultural heritage of the Caribbean in music and writing. Exploring the legacy of enslaved African labor and Chinese indentured labor in the Caribbean, Young and Lowe craft narratives that reconstruct and trouble colonial history. The region’s history cannot be fully understood without listening to its rich musical tradition. Chin will talk about the role of Jamaican Chinese businessmen in the production of reggae music and mobile soundsystems. He will also talk about his storied career in the reggae music industry, which began when his parents Vincent and Patricia Chin founded VP Records in Jamaica in 1979. The currents of the Black Atlantic and the overseas Chinese converge in Caribbean music but also in Young and Lowe’s novels and poetry that tackle themes such as intimacies out of wedlock, masculinities, abandonment, and criminality set in Kingston, Jamaica’s Chinatown and gambling dens in London’s East End. In these cultural texts, Jamaican patois and southern Chinese dialects are sometimes woven together to construct new narrative forms of the Afro-Asian experience in the Americas.

Together with historian John Kuo Wei Tchen and literary scholar Tao Leigh Goffe, panelists will discuss the tensions and intimacies between the minority Chinese community in the Caribbean and the majority Afro-Caribbean community. Other themes to be explored include representations of blackness and Chineseness in Caribbean diasporic literature and music.

This event is part of the Campus Conversations on Identities and is co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies, the Program in American Studies, the Lewis Center for the Arts, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Asian American Students’ Association, and the Princeton Caribbean Connection (PCC).

Misty Copeland on Why She Talks About Being a Black Ballerina

For Harriet
2016-02-24

What Is Critical Race Theory?

Harvard Magazine
2016-03-22

Marina Bolotnikova

Khiara Bridges Photograph courtesy of Khiara Bridges

RACIAL-JUSTICE ACTIVISTS at Harvard Law School (HLS) won one of the largest public battles over the school’s legacy this month, when the administration agreed to abandon the existing HLS shield. The shield was modeled after the crest of the slaveholding Royall family, whose fortune endowed Harvard’s first law professorship; the shield’s removal was the first of a list of demands issued in December by student group Reclaim Harvard Law School. But HLS has not, so far, acted on the group’s larger, more controversial demands—among them, creating a program in critical race theory, a legal-studies movement with origins at Harvard in the 1970s.

On Monday night, Reclaim HLS hosted a critical race theory teach-in by Khiara Bridges, an associate law professor at Boston University, modeled on how she teaches first-year criminal law. “We’re not pretending that we’re disconnected from the real world,” Bridges said as she opened her presentation, alluding to one of the motivating goals of critical race theory: to link activism with academics. The event took place in the student lounge of Wasserstein Hall, which members of Reclaim HLS have occupied for the last month to create opportunities for learning and discussion, and to bring visibility to their demands…

Read the entire article here.

W.T. Jones — Carthage’s best-kept secret: From slave to industrialist in the South

The Courier-Tribune
Ashboro, North Carolina
2016-03-15

Judi Brinegar

(Contributed photo)

He was born the son of a slave and her white owner in 1833. By time time of his death in 1910, William T. Jones was one of the prominent business owners in Carthage. He rubbed elbows with the elite, white, upper class in Moore County during the 1880s, dined with them, threw elaborate holiday parties where most of the guests were white, and even attended church with them. Both of his wives, Sophia Isabella McLean and Florence Dockery were white. Dockery was the daughter of a well-to-do Apex family.

Yet, until a decade ago, few in this small Moore County town acknowledged out loud that Jones was not a white man.

Then, Pat Motz-Frazier entered the scene in 2005. She purchased Jones home, built in 1880 for his wife, Florence, and today runs it as a bed and breakfast, aptly named “The Old Buggy Inn.”

“He built this huge elaborate house because he and his wife wanted to fill it with children,” Motz-Frazier says. “Unfortunately, they never had any.”

Motz-Frazier ran into many brick walls while trying to research the history of her historic Victorian home. Many of those she asked, declined to acknowledge that Jones, president of the Tyson & Jones Buggy Company, was anything but a white man, she says. Slowly and methodically, she finally put together the pieces of the puzzle of what was a remarkable story of Jones, one man who, in the 19th century, never let the color of his skin define him…

Read the entire article here.

Jackie Kay the new Scots Makar, Shaping the Body

Woman’s Hour
BBC Radio 4
2016-03-25

The acclaimed writer Jackie Kay has just been announced as the next Scots Makar – Scotland’s national poet. She tells Jenni about the plans she has for her new role.

Today a new exhibition examining how food, fashion and lifestyle have shaped women’s bodies and lives opens at York Castle Museum. The curator Ali Bodley and fashion historian Lucy Adlington join Jenni to talk about 400 years of squeezing and binding. And, how the current vogue for big bottoms and padded underwear echoes the false rumps of the past.

Mary Magdalene – what do we know about the woman who was described as the constant companion of Jesus, who wept at the foot of the Cross, and who gave the first account of the empty tomb? What is it about her story that continues to fascinate and what evidence is there that she was a prostitute or even the wife of Jesus? Michael Haag author of The Quest for Mary Magdalene speaks to Jenni.

Penrose Halson author of “Marriages are Made In Bond Street” traces the history of one of Britain’s most successful marriage bureaux founded by two twenty-four year olds in the Spring of 1939. Penrose eventually became the proprietor and she tells Jenni about the remarkable cross-section of British society in the 1940’s who found partners through this tiny London office.

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

What Obama’s visit means for Cuba’s national conversation about race

The Los Angeles Times
2016-03-21

Kate Linthicum, Contact Reporter

In recent years, Afro-Cuban intellectuals have started gathering in a cramped Havana apartment to discuss a topic long considered off-limits in Cuba: race.

Fidel Castro’s communist revolution 60 years ago promised to wipe out racial divisions and level the playing field for all Cubans, regardless of color or wealth. Yet racism persists in Cuba, and many say recent economic changes here have overwhelmingly favored the light-skinned elite.

The historic visit this week of an American president who happens to be black is of special significance to Afro-Cubans, who, like many minorities around the world, view President Obama as a symbol of what is possible. It’s of particular importance for the small but growing movement of black activists on the island, who have struggled for years under government pressure, and who hope that warming U.S.-Cuba relations will push Cubans toward greater race consciousness.

“Maybe without an enemy, everyone here can begin to look more closely at things inside our own country,” said activist Manuel Cuesta Morua, who said he is one of several Cuban dissidents, most of whom are not black, invited to meet with Obama on Tuesday. “We hope it will help people see the racism here with more clarity, and see that there is diversity, and diverse ways of thinking.”…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons [Twentieth Anniversary Edition]

Duke University Press
2016
184 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-6147-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-6166-4

Jane Lazarre

“I am Black,” Jane Lazarre’s son tells her. “I have a Jewish mother, but I am not ‘biracial.’ That term is meaningless to me.” In this moving memoir, Jane Lazarre, the white Jewish mother of now adult Black sons, offers a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America as she tells the story of how she came to understand the experiences of her African American husband, their growing sons, and their extended family. Recounting her education, as a wife, mother, and scholar-teacher, into the realities of African American life, Lazarre shows how although racism and white privilege lie at the heart of American history and culture, any of us can comprehend the experience of another through empathy and learning.

This Twentieth Anniversary Edition features a new preface, in which Lazarre’s elegy for Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others, reminds us of the continued resonance of race in American life. As #BlackLivesMatter gains momentum, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is more urgent and essential than ever.